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(Scott’s wife, Catherine McKenna, is the Eco Barbie currently serving under Prime Minister Justin Bieber as Canada’s Minister for the Environment and Climate Change, so perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised by the lameness of the politics…)

And here’s another, from a pubescent left-wing activist and BBC regular called Owen Jones, which ought to bring up whatever there is left of your breakfast.

And here – dry heave, now, I fear – is a particularly smug and noisome offering from the deputy editor of what used to be a men’s style magazine, Esquire.

Did you see what they all just did there? Well, let me explain, with reference to a rather strange trip I took about 25 years ago, to Europe’s last (and worst) Communist tyranny, Albania.

The country had just opened up to the West after four decades of abject poverty and misery, most of them under the tyrannical Stalinist dictator Enver Hoxha. Albania was a prison state akin to North Korea. People who tried to escape were shot; food was meager; the cities were polluted and uglified with dreary communist architecture; everyone looked gray and miserable; freedom of speech was, of course, forbidden: there were spies everywhere and political prisoners ended up in jail or worse…

A top EPA official has resigned, supposedly in protest at the direction the Agency has taken under President Trump.
Or — as we climate realists prefer to put it — #winning.

Elizabeth “Betsy” Southerland had worked at the EPA for thirty years. But on Tuesday she resigned from her post as director of science and technology in the Office of Water, claiming “the environmental field is suffering from the temporary triumph of myth over truth.”

Just what incredibly good news Southerland’s departure is can be best be appreciated by reading her farewell letter.

It’s supposed to be her Parthian shot — a damning indictment of the decline of a once-great institution under the wicked Donald Trump and his sinister henchman, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt.

But, actually, it tells you rather more about the weird, reality-denying mindset which prevails among the inhabitants of the swamp which Trump is busily trying to drain.

“It’s never been harder to be a climate scientist,” claims a heartrending piece in New Republic.

Climate scientists working directly for the Trump administration are the most affected. A report published last week by the Union of Concerned Scientists describes a “culture of fear” as government scientists are gagged, sidelined, or fired, and funding cuts loom. “Some are afraid to utter the words ‘climate change,’” the report reads.

But wait. You haven’t got to the saddest part, yet.

“All action at the agency on climate has effectively stopped,” an EPA air quality scientist told The Guardian in June. And they’re being discouraged from interacting with other climate scientists. “There was a climate conference in Atlanta last month and EPA employees were told not to go,” the scientist said, “so even simple interactions are coming to an end.”

In sadness terms I would say that this is quite literally even sadder than a picture on the internet of a cute kitten with a bandaged paw.

Think about it. These EPA scientists work hard to spend your tax dollar. That trip to the climate conference in Atlanta would have afforded them a vital opportunity not just to rack up air miles but also to broaden their understanding of the challenges facing us. For example, by visiting the legendary Georgia Aquarium they would get to experience at first hand all the innocent sea creatures that are likely to be melted if ever ocean acidification actually becomes a thing.

The United States – the world’s largest gas consumer and producer – will account for 40% of the world’s extra gas production to 2022 thanks to the remarkable growth in its domestic shale industry. By 2022, US production will be 890 bcm, or more than a fifth of global gas output. Production from the Marcellus, one of the world’s largest fields, will increase by 45% between 2016 and 2022, even at current low price levels, as producers increase efficiency and produce more gas with fewer rigs.

While US domestic demand for gas is growing, thanks to higher consumption from the industrial sector, more than half of the production increase will be used for liquefied natural gas (LNG) for export. By 2022, the IEA estimates that the United States will be on course to challenge Australia and Qatar for global leadership among LNG exporters.

These findings – from a report by Professor Gordon Hughes, Professor of Economics at the University of Edinburgh and a former adviser to the World Bank – vindicate a recent call by President Trump to cut the 2018 budget for CCS research by 77 percent.

They also make a mockery of the grandiose schemes proposed by the International Energy Agency and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to decarbonize the global economy in line with the Paris Agreement. Both organizations have made heroic assumptions about the value of CCS technology in helping to meet their CO2 reductions targets.

Here, for example, is the ex-head of the IPCC Rajendra Pachauri touting it at the time of the last IPCC Assessment Report in 2014:

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) – the nascent technology which aims to bury CO2 underground – is deemed extremely important by the IPPC. It estimates that the cost of the big emissions cuts required would more than double without CCS. Pachauri said: “With CCS it is entirely possible for fossil fuels to continue to be used on a large scale.”

This, we can now see from Hughes’s detailed report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation, is just more of the kind of “harnessing-the-magical-power-of-organic-unicorns”-style nonsense we’ve come to expect from the IPCC. (And the similarly green-compromised IEA, for that matter).

The idea of CCS – capturing carbon-dioxide from industrial processes and then storing it underground where it can never been released – has been around for nearly 40 years. But it has never worked on a commercial scale and now almost certainly never will.

Already very expensive – in the UK, Hughes estimates, it would add around £10 to £15 (around $20) per MWh to the price of electricity, adding between £3.5 billion and £5 billion ($4.5 billion and $6.5 billion) to electricity bills – it has been rendered even more financially unviable by renewables, which are propped up with so much subsidy and which have distorted the market so badly that there simply isn’t any realistic possibility of still more money being found for the white elephant that is CCS.

Since the announcements, coal companies are being deferential to the White House, but quietly shifting their emphasis to Congress to save CCS funding in the budget.

Rick Curtsinger, a spokesman for coal company Cloud Peak Energy, said that Trump has been “extremely supportive of America’s coal miners” and that he “has a difficult task in prioritising issues and balancing the budget.”

But, Curtsinger added in an email: “We are hopeful that Congress will support the further development and commercialisation of the carbon capture technology that we believe is necessary for coal to be able to play a long-term role in providing secure, reliable, and affordable electricity while addressing concerns about CO2 and climate.”

But whoever is advising Trump on energy and climate issues is clearly very well informed. However much coal producers might wish it, Carbon Capture and Storage is not the panacea that is suddenly going to make their product eco-friendly.

Does this mean that Trump is about to renege on his election trail compact with the coal-producing states?

Not necessarily. As the below chart shows, stories about the death of coal have been greatly overdone. They are largely put about by the oil and gas industry, which is now keener than almost anyone to promote the climate change scare because it sees it as a means of stealing coal’s market share.

Donald Trump is the only leader left in the world defending Western democracy against eco fascism.
Don’t just take it from me. Read this Belgian philosopher, Drieu Godefridi, interviewed in the French liberal newspaper Contrepoints and translated here by Friends of Science Calgary.

He believes that the Paris climate agreement was a global socialist plot which the U.S. was absolutely right to escape:

[President Trump] perfectly grasped the essence of the Paris Agreement, which is to redistribute the wealth of the West to the rest of the world – he expressly declared it on the Lawn of the White House, on June 1st, 2017 when making the American exit from Paris official. In so doing, he has stopped the formidable internationalist socialist machinery that was in the process of being set up. In other words, he has refused to validate the third-world moral intuition, and the scientific pretext that gave birth to the Paris Agreement.

Environmentalism, argues Godefridi, is just another facet of the left’s ongoing war against democracy:

…Is because he has a very powerful bullshit detector. We know this thanks to a fascinating and unwittingly revelatory article in the German newspaper Der Spiegel.

The paper reveals how, in the days running up to President Trump’s decision to quit the UN Paris accord, he received a series of deputations from EU leaders urging him to change his mind.

“For me it’s easier to stay in than step out,” Trump told them.

This is perfectly true. Since his momentous Rose Garden speech announcing his plans to pull out of Paris, Trump has taken more flak than a thousand-bomber raid over Berlin in ’44.

He has upset his daughter Ivanka, his Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, his financial advisor Gary Cohn. On top of that, he has given the entire liberal half of the planet, plus sundry conservative squishes, the perfect excuse they needed to dismiss him as a science-denying loon in thrall to Big Oil, Big Coal, Big Evil, etc…

Let’s not get too excited just yet about reports that President Trump has made up his mind to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement. We don’t know the terms and conditions. It is entirely possible that what we end up with is a fudge, designed to appease both warring factions in the administration but actually resulting in a muddled cop out which pleases no one.

Should Donald Trump hamstring the U.S. economy, rip off the consumer, despoil the landscape, give succour to America’s enemies and promote junk science – all in order to keep a “seat at the table” with people who despise him and think he’s an idiot?

To some people – including several senior members of the Trump administration – the answer isn’t immediately obvious. Which is why this week both a leading U.S. scientist and a number of top Senate Republicans have had to urge the president to see sense and ignore the siren voices urging him to stay in the UN’s Paris climate agreement.

The 20 top Republicans, led by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., have signed a letter warning the president that remaining in Paris “would subject the United States to significant litigation risk that could up-end your administration’s ability to fulfill its goal of rescinding the Clean Power Plan.”

Meanwhile, the distinguished physicist Will Happer – long mooted as a possible Science Advisor in the Trump administration – has argued that staying in Paris will not only be pointless but will be a betrayal of Trump’s election promise to voters that he would pull out.

Climate policy, however, poses a grave threat. Yes, those who engineered the Paris Agreement will be upset if the United States withdraws. Withdrawal will also outrage the many who profit from climate alarmism. But remaining in the Paris Agreement will not sit well with many of those who voted for Mr. Trump in part because of his campaign promises to withdraw from the agreement. These voters rightly perceived that the agreement would benefit a privileged international elite, at the expense of the common people of the United States and of the rest of the world.

You might think that such interventions ought to be unnecessary. President Trump is, after all, an avowed climate skeptic who has already taken several important steps towards tackling the Green Blob, most recently by promising to eliminate “nearly $1.6 billion in international programs aimed at promoting green energy and fighting global warming.”

Among the targets on his hit list: the United Nations’ Green Climate Fund (GCF), which hands out money for programs to adapt or mitigate global warming; the Clean Technology Fund and the Strategic Climate Fund – saving $239 million; and the Global Climate Change Initiative, saving U.S. taxpayers $362 million.

But Trump is still wavering over the Paris climate agreement, which senior members of his administration, including Jared Kushner, daughter Ivanka, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson are urging him not to quit.

Anyone puzzled by the fact that the former CEO of Exxon is supporting an agreement totally opposed to the company’s business model and shareholder interests really needs to read this eye-opening piece by Steve Milloy.

Donald Trump is not a fan of wind turbines, as he has hinted occasionally on Twitter.

But there’s a very powerful lobby which would like us to see wind turbines as being clean, eco-friendly and vital for the planet’s future. So if President Trump is to crush this bloated, parasitical industry as it deserves he’ll need some serious fire support.

This piece by Matt Ridley is a big help. It convincingly demonstrates that wind turbines are even more of a monstrous stupidity than any of us had hitherto imagined.

It starts with a quiz, whose answer may surprise you:

To the nearest whole number, what percentage of the world’s energy consumption was supplied by wind power in 2014, the last year for which there are reliable figures? Was it 20 per cent, 10 per cent or 5 per cent? None of the above: it was 0 per cent. That is to say, to the nearest whole number, there is still no wind power on Earth.

Yep. All those views blighted; all that wildlife sliced and diced; all those billions of dollars of subsidies wasted – in order to produce a form of power so inefficient and triflingly irrelevant that it still supplies not much more than 0 per cent of the world’s energy consumption.

Nationwide, wind provided 5.6 percent of all electricity produced in 2016, an amount of electricity generation that has more than doubled since 2010. Much of the demand for new wind energy generation in recent years has come from Fortune 500 companies including Home Depot, GM, Walmart and Microsoft that are buying wind energy in large part for its low, stable cost.

But then, so many and varied are the half-truths, distractions and outright lies put out the wind industry that in any other sector half of these reptilian scumbags would be behind bars by now for selling a false prospectus.